ROBERT J.

CARDULLO

The Pillar of Ibsenian Drama: Henrik Ibsen and Pillars of Society, Reconsidered
I. Introduction Pillars of Society is the most ignored of the dozen major Ibsen prose plays. Written between 1875 and 1877, it was an immediate success and made Ibsen the champion of radical artists and social reformers throughout Europe, especially in Germany. Within four months of its publication in October 1877, it was being performed simultaneously at five different theaters in Berlin alone; within a year it had been produced by twenty-seven German-speaking theaters, besides productions in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Pillars of Society remained part of the standard Ibsen repertory through the first several decades of the twentieth century and was produced a number of times in England and America. But it is rarely presented in English today. Indeed, to take a prominent example, the American Conservatory Theaters revival of the play in 1974 was the first major American production of it in over half a century. Critically the play has fared no better. Pillars of Society was the work that got William Archer excited about Ibsen, and it was the first Ibsen play to be translated into Englishby Archerbut a few years after his translation he declared that British theater audiences had grown so advanced and enlightened that the play already seemed commonplace and old-fashioned. Most modern critics seem to agree, by default if nothing else. To wit: no major critical essay or article on the play has been published in several decades, and even full-length books on Ibsen usually either pass over it entirely or grudgingly accept it as another one in the long bumbling series of Ibsens apprenticeship plays. Again and again we hear the same litany of complaints that includes its creaky plot, its improbabilities, its psychologically unjustified final reversal, its superficial idealismall colored, of course, by our glib, liberal self-assurance that modern, enlightened contemporary Western society is leagues beyond the short-sighted, conservative, repressed, hypocritical world presented in the play. Moreover, Pillars of Society is still approached as a problem play in the narrowest definition of that term. (Shaw was correct in pointing out that, actually, all good plays are problem plays.) From this point of view, the meaning of the play indeed becomes simplistic, i.e., that bourgeois society is hypocritical and its leaders are often corrupt. But, as Horatio advised Hamet long ago, There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave / To tell us this. Ibsen worked longer (over two years) on Pillars of Society than on any of his twenty-six plays; five rough drafts of it survive, more than of any other drama of his. Upon its completion, Ibsen said that Pillars of Society was of all my works

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the one composed with the greatest artistry. Far from being an apprenticeship play, then, it is the mature work of a dramatic genius on which he brought all his imaginative powers to bearthe first time, in fact, that Ibsens manifold creative talents become totally fused in the same work. II. The Road to Pillars of Society Pillars of Society is the first of the twelve-play series of realistic plays referred to by Ibsen himself as his prose cycle, which he regarded as a single dramatic entity unto itself. It was immediately preceded by the play Ibsen considered his masterpiece, the massive Emperor and Galilean (1873). Emperor and Galilean, subtitled a world-historical drama, deals with the fourth-century A.D. Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, who disavowed the official state religion, Christianity, and tried to reestablish the worship of Dionysus and other pagan deities. The conflict of the play, as outlined below by Julian, is the struggle between Dionysus (the First Empire) and Christ (the Second Empire):
All human emotions have been forbidden since that day the seer of Galilee began to rule the world. With him, to live is to die. To love and hate are to sin. But has he changed mans flesh and blood? Is man still not earthbound as before? With every healthy fiber of our being we revolt against it; . . . and yet we are told to will against our own will. Thou shalt, thou shalt, thou shalt!

Julian tries to grab hold of the reins of history but is crushed between two monolithic imperatives, each of which makes absolute and contradictory demands. The dialectic is not resolved, and no synthesis emerges; the resolution of this great world-historical dialectic will be the Third Empire, for which the world is still waiting. Emperor and Galilean is the dead center of Ibsens dramaturgy. In fact, one could say that the entire prose cycle is a rewriting of this single play, on a seemingly lesser scale but still featuring conflicting categorical imperatives that are in the end irreconcilable. Put another way, Emperor and Galilean is Ibsens Divina Comedia and the prose cycle his Comdie Humaine. (Interestingly, the play was published in the same year as Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy.) At first glance, Emperor and Galilean and Pillars of Society seem worlds apart. Emperor and Galilean is written in ten acts (it is over 250 pages long in some published texts), employs ten different settings, a cast of over seventy parts plus dozens of supernumeraries, and is set in ancient times. Moreover, although mainly prose, its language is consciously poetic and far removed from that spoken in real life. No wonder that most critics address the two plays, when they address them at all, as if they were the works of two different playwrights. The point, however, is that they were written by the same man.

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Some features of Emperor and Galilean that are integral to an understanding of Ibsens dramaturgy should be noted. It is a work of immense scope: its dramatic axis is the collision of world orders and systems of values. The play presents the moral and social consciousness of man, not as something foreordained or established in a system of immutable value, but as something that changes and evolves through the resolution of contradictionthat is, through dialectics or, in dramatic terms, conflict. Finally, in a dramatic text that is already highly refer-ential or allusive, the setting and design are time and again overtly symbolic, metaphorical, or even allegorical. After completing Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen returned to Norway in July 1874 for the first time in a decade and stayed for almost nine months. He had become a celebrity in his homeland. After a performance of The League of Youth (1869), he was honored by the students of Oslo with a torchlight procession through the streets that included songs, a poem composed for the occasion, and speeches. This event may well have inspired the final scene of Pillars of Society. It was at this rally where he made his famous declaration that the task of the poet was not to reflect, but to see. In the spring of 1875 Ibsen left Norway for Germany, where he saw a production of Bjrnsons The Bankrupt. In this play, as in The Editor (1874), Bjrnson had abondoned verse and historical drama to write a contemporary social problem play that questioned the hypocrisy of bourgeois society. Ibsen would follow the artistic lead of his fellow countryman, but in the process he would up the ante considerably, In 1875, as Ibsen grappled with the problem of form, he was in the middle of his career. He had written fourteen plays, all but one either totally or partially in verse, and over seventy poems. Although he was no longer active in the practical theater, he had directed over 100 plays and done the set and costume designs for dozens of others. But Ibsen was concerned that he was losing touch with the modern theater. Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) themselves had not been written for the stage, and no one would even consider a production of Emperor and Galilean for over twenty years. As he sought to find the future direction of his work, in 1875 Ibsen wrote his last two poems of any length, Sanger-Hilsen til Sverige and a rhymed letter sent to the Danish critic Georg Brandes. Here is a short excerpt from each, both, significantly, touching on the theme of the new or the future:
The songs of our springtime have a new rhythm . . . The singers are the young, and to the peoples soul They will chant the dawning of a new age. (Sverige, my trans.) You see, dear friendEuropes steamship line Points toward a new land, And you and I both have tickets And a seat reserved on the quarter-deck. . . . (Brandes letter, my trans.)

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Next Ibsen set to work on his new play, Pillars of Society, a serious drama in prose set in contemporary times, which he said would be new and appropriate, to the present day in every respect. The most difficult and important decision of his literary career, Ibsens resolve to abandon verse was based largely on his belief that verse and a literary vocabulary were no longer functional in the modern theater. In an 1883 letter he would write that for verse he could scarcely find any application worth mentioning in the drama, and that the poetic objectives of the future will surely not be reconcilable with it. In this same letter he advised the actress Lucie Wolf that a true artist of the stage, whose repertoire is the contemporary drama, should not be willing to let a single line of verse cross her lipsquite a declaration from the author of Loves Comedy (1862), Brand, and Peer Gynt. The choice of dramatic realism and a language close to the vernacular denied Ibsen the lexicon of the great dramatic poets who had preceded him. Instead of traditional poetic diction, Ibsen sought to formulate a new poetic vocabulary rooted in the modern theater and suited to dramatic realisma poetry of things or objects, let us say, more than words. He would have to bring every element of the theater to bear in order to create this new theatrical poetry: the set, stage directions, props, costumes, and lighting as well as the actual spoken lines of the text and the subtextual or unspoken dialogue that would often lie beneath it. Ibsen had first started thinking about the play that would eventually become Pillars of Society after he had completed The League of Youth, a Scribean satirical comedy about contemporary politics. In 1870 he wrote the preliminary notes for a new contemporary comedy: the theme of the play generally will be that of womens modest position in society amongst all the bustle of the men and their petty aims. These notes turned into a three-page outline, which he put aside when he started working on Emperor and Galilean. Ibsen returned to this outline in 1875, and for a year and a half he worked meticulously on the new play. In 1876, while laboring over the fourth draft of Pillars of Society, Ibsen went to Berlin to see the Meiningen Companys acclaimed production of his play The Pretenders (written in 1863, immediately before Brand). Even though this drama is set in Norways Viking past, he was struck by the companys use of three-dimensional realistic scenery, their advanced staging techniques, and their prototypical deployment of ensemble playing. Ibsen was not often pleased when he saw his own plays performed, but he called this production brilliant and spectacular. George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, invited the playwright to visit him and study the Companys work in closer detail, which Ibsen did that summer. When he returned to Munich, he scrapped his last working draft of Pillars of Society, which called for four different settings, and rewrote the play for a single set. Ibsen drew on many real-life parallels for the play. The small coastal town in Norway where the action takes place is modeled on Grimstad, where Ibsen had worked for six years as a young man. Edmund Gosse described the town (population of less than a thousand) as a small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothing at all, visitable only by steamer. The Palm Tree in the play was an

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actual Grimstad ship, and Karsten Bernick was based on the Grimstad shipping and business tycoon Morten Smith-Petersen. Aune, Bernicks foreman, was very likely drawn from the radical labor organizer Marcus Thrane, whom Ibsen had met. The character of Lona Hessel (Mrs. Bernicks elder half-sister) was suggested by Aasta Hansteen, who herself was involved in the struggle for Womens Emancipation. The practice of superficially patching up unseaworthy ships, insuring them to the hilt, and then sending them out to sea in the hope of their sinking was a common way for shipowners to cut their losses. This dubious practice received a lot of attention in the press during Ibsens nine-month stay in Norway in 1874, and the issue reached the level of an international scandal in July 1875, when Samuel Plimsoll unleashed a savage attack in Englands Parliament on the murderers and scoundrels who employed such tactics. Before going further, let me summarize the action of Pillars of Society for those who do not know or remember the play. Karsten Bernick is the most prominent businessman in a small coastal town in Norway, with interests in shipping and shipbuilding in a long-established family firm. Now he is planning his most ambitious project yet, backing a railway that will connect the town to the main rail line and open up a fertile valley which he has been secretly buying up. But suddenly Bernicks past comes back to haunt him. Johan Tnnesen, his wifes younger brother, returns from America to the town he fled fifteen years earlier. At the time it was thought he had tried to escape with money stolen from the Bernick family business, as well as to avoid a scandal connected with his affair with an actress. But none of this was true. He left town to take the blame for Bernick, who was the one who had actually been having the affair and was nearly caught with the actress. Besides, there was no money for Johan to take, since at the time the Bernick firm was almost bankrupt. With Tnnesen from America comes his half-sister Lona, who once loved and was loved by Bernick. But he rejected her and married his current wife for money so that he could rebuild the family business. In the years since Tnnesen left, the town has cultivated ever greater rumors of his wickedness, helped by Bernicks studious refusal to reveal the truth of the matter. This particular dramatic potion only needs a spark to explode, and it gets one when Tnnesen falls in love with young Dina Dorf, who is the daughter of the actress involved in the scandal of fifteen years ago, and who now lives as a charity case in the Bernick household. Tnnesen demands that Bernick tell the girl the truth; Bernick refuses. When Tnnesen then says he will go back to the United States to clear up his affairs and then come back to town to marry Dina, Bernick sees his chance to get out of this mess of his own making. His yard is repairing an American ship, the Indian Girl, which is deeply unseaworthy. Bernick orders his yard foreman to finish the work by the next day, even if it means sending the ship and its crew to certain death, because he wants Tnnesen to die on board. That way Bernick will be free of any danger of exposure in the future. But matters do not work out quite in the way he wants. Tnnesen runs off with Dina on board another ship that is safe, leaving word that

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he will be back. And Bernick's young son stows away on the Indian Girl, thereby seemingly heading for certain death. Bernick discovers that his plot has gone disastrously wrong on the very night the people of the town have gathered to honor him for his contribution to the city. The whole of the action in Pillars of Society is thus set up for a tragic conclusion, but suddenly Ibsen pulls back from the brink. The yard foreman gets an attack of conscience and rows out to stop the Indian Girl from heading to almost certain disaster at sea; Bernicks son is brought back safely by his mother; and Bernick addresses the community, telling them most of the truth and getting away with his sins of the past. His wife even greets the news that he only married her for money as a sign there is now some hope for their marriage. III. Pillars of Society In a single stroke Pillars of Society transformed the Western stage and moved bourgeois drama onto a new level and into an entirely new frame of reference. Although the specifics of its action are extremely particularized and the characters fully-drawn psychologically, the scope of the drama is huge in its implications and resonances. Remember, Ibsen had said that the poet must not reflect, but see. His purpose was not to create yet another version of bourgeois mimesis, but to use the stage itself as metaphor; dramatic realism in this case was not the aesthetic end, but the means. I wish to clarify this statement through a close examination of the first few scenes of the play. The setting is the garden-room in the home of Bernick the shipbuilder. There are large glass doors and windows upstage through which a spacious garden is visible. Beyond the garden is a fence and a street lined . . . with small, colorfully painted wooden houses where we can get a glimpse of sunstruck humanity, sweating and haggling over its petty affairs, as the schoolmaster Rrlund describes the scene. The room is only partially lit by the bright, early afternoon sunshine coming from outside. On stage a group of the towns civic-minded women is sewing clothes for distribution to the poor. Even though it is warm and sunny outsidea rare thing in Norwayeveryone is seated inside. During the scene the curtains are even drawn such that the room is lit solely by artificial light. Rrlund stands reciting aloud from a book; and upstage in the garden, young Olaf (the Bernicks thirteen-year-old son) runs around playing with a toy crossbow, a weapon suggestive of Norways Viking past. Within the first few lines of the play, Aune, who is almost an out-and-out socialist, tries to get in to see Bernick and argues with Krap (Bernicks confidential clerk) about his right to do as he pleases in his free time, which leads to a hackneyed discussion about the very notion of freedom. Rrlund himself praises the small community for its moral fiber, it faith in the old, traditional values, and its resistance to the new and immoral ideas running rampant in the world outside, which has no moral foundation under its feet. Throughout the scene we hear muffled voices coming from Bernicks inner office.

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Finally, the pillars of this particular society, Bernick and the merchants Rummel, Sandstad, and Vigeland, come slinking out of the smoke-filled room. From this moment on, the contradictions in this society become more and more visible, and they are exposed by Ibsen with ferocious irony as well as uncanny accuracy. The world of the play creates a microcosm of Norwegian society, and, appropriately for the first play in a prose cycle that will explore the nature of human consciousness, the inhabitants of this society operate on the most primitive level of social and ethical consciousness. It is not that people here do not have good intentions, or that they never take moral action. This is not so much an immoral world as an amoral one; and before there can be morality, there must be the consciousness of morality. Henry James himself praised Pillars of Society for its large, dense complexity of moral cross-references . . ., but the society the play depicts happens to be a sub-ethical community of animals (as Hegel described the most primitive level of human social consciousness). Yet bear in mind that the play depicts bourgeois society, which, perhaps more than any other segment, seeks to re-create the world in its own image or likeness. It considers itself, not just one of many potential ways of structuring society, but the absolute pinnacle of all human thought and development. In an act of selfpreservation, bourgeois society creates a mythos, an idealized image of itself that progressively has less and less to do with reality. In the process language is turned on its head, and vocabulary becomes little more than just another bourgeois manifestation or extension of itself. Thus, blatant, unrestrained economic exploitation is called free trade, acts of naked military aggression become protective reactions or self-defense, etc. Although this idealized mythos grows more and more elaborate, and may even seem at times to be anti-bourgeois, the reality is that, in all its interactions, bourgeois humanitys relationship to its environment and to the rest of mankind is defined exclusively in terms of selfinterest and utilitarianism. It is this gap between the bourgeoisies idealized image of itself and the actual reality of human existence that Pillars of Society seeks to explore. Its worth noting at this point that the existence of bourgeois, capitalist society depends at least as much on the exploited as it does on the exploiters. None of the exploiters in Pillars of Society, for example, makes it a conscious goal to commit evil. In fact, everyone here feels that he or she is doing the proper thing. Some of them do commit crimes out of necessityAune does not want to be an accessory to mass murder, but he does want to protect his family. Others are blind or consistently able to see the world as the world is notan ability, according to Rrlund, that is partly an inborn gift and partly an acquired trait. But the most dangerous are those who alter the definition of right and wrong to accommodate their own needs or desires, like Bernick. One of the most disturbing aspects of the play is that when morality does triumph, it does so only accidentally. Some hope initially seems to lie in individual acts of moral courage: for example, Aunes boarding the Indian Girl

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after it has set out, which prevents what would be the ultimate calamity of the playthe death of a number of people, including Olaf. Ironically, Aunes action also saves Bernick and alters what had appeared to be the inevitable tragic design of Pillars of Society. But what Aune does is not truly moral or heroic, for it was really Betty Bernicks pleas that got him to disobey her husbands orders. What would he have done if left solely to his own devices? These and other characters make up a cast of remarkably drawn individuals woven into a complex web of interaction and motivation. Hilmar Tnnesen (Mrs. Bernicks cousin), for his part, is a harmless, domesticated Viking who calls for daring and adventure but who has completely assimilated bourgeois values and prejudices. Johan Tnnesen operates as a sort of psychic double for Bernick: in simplistic terms, something like the good part of him; Lona, spurned by Bernick, has spent the last fifteen years educating his alter ego. But Bernick, when he gets desperate, decides that he must kill off this alter egoJohanin order to save himself. Rrlund is perhaps even more complex than these figures. He spouts the most moral platitudes in the play, and he actually believes himself. Indeed, he could be termed the Bard of the Bourgeoisiethe most valuable tool of the pillars of society because he doesnt have to be bribed, blackmailed, or bullied into helping them with his words. Yet Rrlund is at the same time a watered-down Brand who lashes out at the modern world as weak and unclean. He sees industrialization and technology, for example, as another form of idolatry and is against the railroad, which will cut through the virgin countryside and better link his community with the outside world. Some of the women in this society offer the major hope for change, partly due to their superior instincts and partly due to their centuries of exploitation. Only the women in the play are self-sacrificing, and a few are courageous in their attempts to break the shackles of social and sexual bondage. I am referring not just to Martha Bernick (Karsten Bernicks sister) and Dina Dorf, the only persons in the community who really question what is happening around them, but also to Lona Hessel, the sole character in the play to have reached a new and higher level of consciousness. Mrs. Rummel, Mrs. Holt, and Mrs. Lynge, the chorus of gossipmongers whose prototypes may be found in Loves Comedy, themselves have been brainwashed to worship their otherwise meaningless roles as appendages to the men who run the bourgeois world. Ironically, these women imitate their male counterparts and build their own caste system: just as the men send the women out of the room when they talk business, for example, the women send Dina and their daughters (Hilda Rummel and Netta Holt) out of the room when they talk gossip. Dina Dorf, a lass of spunk and courage, is clearly tied to Hjrdis of The Vikings at Helgeland (1857) and Svanbild of Loves Comedy. In two years she will be the Nora who slams the door on the doll house. Martha Bernick is akin to the Thea of Hedda Gabler (1890)both of them strong women who may not initially appear to be so. Marthas sister-in-law, Betty Bernick, herself might have been an independent person of substance, but instead she has lived the dutiful, self-abnegatory myth of the bourgeois wife. Lona, for her part, is a woman from

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the New World, a location whose name speaks for itself. Like Apollo or Athena, Lona is the bringer of light; her entrance is prepared for by the closing of all the windows and the pulling shut of the curtains. She enters, then parts the curtains to let the light in and opens the windows to air out the room. Ironically, Lona was first mentioned in the play by Mrs. Rummel as the dark spot (sun spot in Norwegian) on Bernicks happiness. The plot of the Pillars of Society, rather than being creaky, is one of the clearest indications of Ibsens mastery of his medium. There is a late point of attack, with the action of the play gaining momentum at the same time as (figuratively speaking) it moves backward in time, growing more and more complex, and expanding its radius of implications. What is actually a long series of subplots is unified into a single, ever-widening, and whole action, with each complication a cog in the wheel that drives the catastrophe forward even as it simultaneously refers back to, or threatens to reveal, some previous lie, deception, or crime. For example, Aunes moral crisis over the fate of the Indian Girl and its crew triggers a further moral crisis in Bernick, pushing him to make the decision that human life must be sacrificed for the greater good of society. Kraps own attempt to be conscientious (or is he just trying to get Aune fired?) reveals Bernicks automatic, almost unconscious ability to manipulate indiviuals and events. Bernick sinks lower and lower in the audiences estimation as the plot forces him into corner after corner and he responds with greater and greater moral audacity, if not arrogance. Step by step he is pushed beyond the boundaries of any locus of moral values. By the end of Act III, Bernick has become a trapped, raging animal who takes for granted that his actions are beyond good and evil because working for the good of societyproviding jobs, bringing prosperity to the community, and aiding progress in general. If this type of reasoning sounds familiar, that is because the same arguments are used every day to justify the creation of neutron bombs and the rape of the natural environment. Far from being outdated or simplistic, the strategic maneuverings of the characters and the conspiratorial nature of their business affairs in Pillars of Society are precisely in line with the contemporary reality of politics, technology, and commerce. Structurally, the public nature of Acts I and IV of the play are balanced against the private nature of Acts II and III, which are composed almost entirely of scenes between two or three individuals. (Imagistically, this public-private opposition is complemented by the opposition or struggle between light and darkness.) This balance aside, the great structural problem in Pillars of Society has always been the ending, where the play seems to shift gears. As one nineteenth-century critic put it, Ibsen planned a tragedy and bouleversed it into a farce. A momentous inevitability, a tragic force that has been building up for two-and-a-half hours, is suddenly reversed in the last ten minutes. How, then, are we to take the ending of the play and Bernicks apparent epiphany? Is Ibsen trying to drive home some nave, idealistic point about mans ability to change and ultimately to change the world? Can years of deception and crime be atoned for so easily and bloodlessly?

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In his great confessional scene, Bernick claims to be coming clean, but can he or should he be taken totally at his word? He is remarkably vague about the past and Johans role, or non-role, in it, he does not even mention Lona, and he conveniently skips over the affair of the Indian Girl and his thwarted attempt at mass murder. This last scene demands closer examination, since it is the single most important criticaland directorialproblem in the drama. The action of Pillars of Society has been propelled relentlessly forward to what is clearly intended to be a scne faire. Lona stands clutching the letters that can expose and destroy Bernick. Johan and Dina, not to mention Olaf, seem to be on their way to certain death. Up the street come parade banners and a torchlight procession. Although this final movement thus seems like something out of the well-made play, Ibsen undercuts every one of the potentially melodramatic or sentimental elements in it. Lona tears up the letters; Olaf, Johan, and Dina are saved, as is the Indian Girl; the parade and festivities lose all direction. As Bernick prepares to address the crowd, he stands behind a large curtain like an actor about to enter the stage and play a grand scene. Rrlund even lays the icons of civilization at the feet of this pillar society: the silver goblet and coffee service (crafts), an album of photographs (technology), and a collection of sermons, printed on vellum and sumptuously bound (art and religion). The encomium by Rrlund is the longest speech in the play and is followed by Bernicks own lengthy and platitudinous confession, which wins over the townspeople. Then there is the final tableau of Bernick surrounded by his family, in addition to the sententious exchanges with Lona that remind us of the optimistic, concluding couplets of much eighteenth-century drama. If this last scene is not ironic, and even comic (recall that in 1870 when Ibsen began work on Pillars of Society, he called it a comedy), then there is no such thing as irony. Bernick may well believe every word he says, but the fact is, he has just pulled off another grand political coup, the greatest of his career, and he has turned to advantage even his own guilt. Far from being navely idealistic, the plays ending poses a paradox, further underscores the inherent contradictions on which this society is based, and stresses the helplessness of humanity in the hands of a pillar of society like Bernick. As Rolf Fjelde points out in his introduction to the play, Bernick is that most dangerous type of public man, the born opportunist who, with the agility of a dropped cat, can turn even contrition to his own advantage. Undoubtedly, he must continue to be closely watched. IV. Pillars of Society and the Prose Cycle I cannot think of another playwright whose work is as self-referential as Ibsens. It is as if, for his entire career, he were rewriting a single Ur-play. Ibsen himself said that only by grasping and comprehending my entire production as a continuous and coherent whole will the reader be able to receive the precise impression I sought to convey in the individual parts of it. He also said that in order to be understood, his plays had to be read in the order in which I wrote

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them. It is therefore important to look at Pillars of Society in relation to the plays that follow it, especially the next three, A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), and An Enemy of the People (1882). Together they form a tetralogy linked structurally as well as thematically. Furthermore, the conflict in each play leads to a dialectical synthesis that serves as the given (or thesis) for the next play. The opening work, Pillars of Society, begins on the most primitive level of social and ethical consciousness, as I have discussed. Then each play in the tetralogy takes this consciousness one step farther, as personified in the protagonists: after Bernick, Nora, Mrs. Alving, and Dr. Stockmann; in this scheme, Bernicks crude, nave fascism develops into Stockmanns scientific, impassioned vision of a moral Platonic dictatorship. The public-private structure of the four acts of Pillars of Society itself is a paradigm of the structure of the first four plays in the cycle taken together; i.e., the large-cast, externally driven plays, Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People, are balanced by the two small-cast, inner-directed plays, A Doll House and Ghosts. As early as 1882 Ibsen was already referring to his prose plays as a series. After the completion of Ghosts, in correspondence with an American publisher, he insisted that the three plays (Pillars of Society, A Doll House, and Ghosts) be published in the order in which they were written: This one (Ghosts) goes the furthest, and ought to be the last of the series. This should, I suggest, open with Pillars of Society, after which should come A Doll House, since it forms as it were an introduction to, or preparation for, Ghosts. Each of these three plays has a single set, and all are set indoors (as is An Enemy of the People). Each of the dramas centers on the family as the paradigmatic unit of society; Ghosts is even subtitled a family drama. Karsten Bernick himself declares that the family is the core of societyso much so in Pillars of Society that at least half of the large cast is related by birth or marriage. And Pillars of Society, like An Enemy of the People at the close of the tetralogy, ends with a final tableau of the family huddled together. In the course of the first three plays in this tetralogy, the scope of the action is wound tighter and tighter, as the casts shrink from nineteen to seven to five. The length of the action is itself reduced, as Pillars of Society takes place over five days, A Doll House three days, and Ghosts a single night. (This last play, incidentally, observes all three classical unities.) In each of the first four cycle plays, an alien, a visitor returning or coming from afarLona Hessel, Mrs. Linde, Oswald Alving, Thomas Stockmannbrings with him or her a new, enlightened code of ethics or system of values and thereby sets in motion the dialectical conflict of the drama. Each of these characters arrives armed with a new outlook on life that challenges or calls into question the existing social and moral order. In Pillars of Society, Lona brings the ideals of truth and freedom and comes from a mythical American Westthe New World or the Land beyond the Horizon, where people are genuinely liberated. These ideals of truth and freedom then return with a vengeance in the next three plays, as they also do later in The Wild Duck (1884).

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Each of the four plays in the tetralogy also revolves around a central dramatic or poetic metaphor. In An Enemy of the People it is the metaphor of the Baths. The Baths are the lifeblood of the community, but they are poisoned: instead of cleansing and healing as they should, they cause harm. Stockmann, as a scientist, proposes his new plan for the ideal Baths, a plan suggestive of the ideal Hellenic society he envisions. In Ghosts, the central metaphor is worship of the dead, sociologically a ritual that has developed in every culture and civilization on earthexcept that here that worship is extended to include dead ideas and dead values. This metaphor is coupled with the most savage and uncompromising one in Ibsens dramatic oeuvre: congenital syphilis, or one generations tainted legacy to the next. In A Doll House, of course, the title refers to a house built for dolls in which people are trying, and ultimately failing, to live. Aside from its own central metaphor, which I shall discuss below, Pillars of Society contains a number of motifs and parallels found in Ibsens other plays. Most obvious is the situation of the two women (Lona Hessel and Betty Bernick) in love with the same man, which we see in Hedda Gabler. The most significant parallels to Pillars of Sociey, however, are to be found in John Gabriel Borkman (1896)the last play before the epilogue of the cycle in 1899, When We Dead Awaken (subtitled a dramatic epilogue). The protagonist of each drama, a captain of industry, has married for money, not love. John Gabriel Borkman, written almost twenty years after Pillars of Society, is a reexamination of a Bernick who has fallen from power. Betty, excluded from this Bernicks life and work, has here grown into the bitter, vengeful Gunhild. Olaf has grown up into Erhart in John Gabriel Borknan: each has been groomed to carry on the lifes work of his father, but both wind up running away from home. Bernicks prosaic enthusiasm about the railroad plan should be compared to Borkmans own aria as he surveys his kingdom for the last time:
BERNICK Just think of the vast tracts of forest thatll be opened up! The rich leads of ore to mine! And the river, with one waterfall after another! The possibilities of industrial development are limitless! _________________________________________________________ BORKMAN I feel the veins of metal, reaching their curving, branching, beckoning arms out to me (His hands outstretched.) Ill whisper to you here in the silence of the night. I love you, lying there unconscious in the depths and the darkness! I love you, you riches straining to be born I love you, love you, love you!

The central metaphor of Pillars of Society is the Indian Girl, a ship whose hull and substructure have rotted away entirely but which is made to look seaworthy by superficial patching or bandaging. It is not surprising, of course, that a Norwegian writer should use a ship as a symbol; Ibsen did it often in his poetry. The image of the ship, which Shaw himself used in Heartbreak House (1919), stands for the ship of state or the state of society. The talk about the Indian Girl

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in Pillars of Society may seem literal, but in the context of the play, it is designed to extend beyond the realm of realism:
AUNE. The hulls rotted out, Mr. Bernick. The more we patch it, the worse it gets. _______________________________________________ KRAP. Dont like saying itbut its the plain truth. Im telling you, funny things are going on. Been no new timber put in, so far as I could see. Just plugged up and caulked and patched over with plates and tarp and that sort of thing. Pure fake! The Indian Girl will never make New York. Shell go to the bottom like a sprung bucket.

Ibsen is implying that if we want to change society, we must bring new timber and rebuild from the inside out, not just continue to repair the faulty exterior. I am reminded here of the speech where he expressed a similar lack of faith in political movements: They want only their own special revolutionsexternal revolutions. . . . What is really needed is a revolution of the human spirit. Pillars of society, indeed. WORKS CITED Andreas-Salom, Lou, and Siegfried Mandel. Ibsens Heroines. New York: Limelight, 1989. Archer, William. Study and Stage: A Yearbook of Criticism. London: Grant Richards, 1899. Beyer, Edward. Ibsen: The Man and His Work. New York: Taplinger, 1980. Bloom, Harold, ed. Henrik Ibsen: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. 1999. New York: Chelsea House, 2010. Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth. A Commentary on the Works of Henrik Ibsen. New York: Russell & Russell, 1973. Bradbrook, M. C. Ibsen, the Norwegian. London: Chatto & Windus, 1946. Bryan, George B. An Ibsen Companion: A Dictionary-Guide to the Life, Works, and Critical Reception of Henrik Ibsen. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984. Chamberlain, John S. Ibsen: The Open Vision. London: Athlone, 1982. Clurman, Harold. Ibsen. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977. Downs, Brian Westerdale. A Study of Six Plays by Ibsen. New York: Octagon Books, 1972. ----------. Ibsen: The Intellectual Background. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. Durbach, Errol. Ibsen the Romantic: Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982.

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----------. Ibsen and the Theatre: The Dramatist in Production. New York: New York University Press, 1980. ----------, ed. Ibsen and the Theatre: Essays in Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Henrik Ibsens Birth. London: Macmillan, 1982. Egan, Michael. Henrik Ibsen. New York: Routledge, 2009. ----------, ed. Henrik Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge, 1997. Fjelde, Rolf, trans. Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978. ----------, ed. Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965. Goldman, Michael. Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Gosse, Edmund. Henrik Ibsen. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1908. Gray, Ronald. Ibsen, A Dissenting View. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Haugen, E. I. Ibsens Drama: Author to Audience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979. Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of the Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Holtan, Orley I. Mythic Patterns in Ibsens Last Plays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970. Hornby, Richard. Patterns in Ibsens Middle Plays. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1981. Ibsen, Henrik. Letters of Henrik Ibsen. Trans. John Nilsen Laurvik and Mary Morison. New York: Fox, Duffield & Co., 1905. ----------. Letters and Speeches. Trans. Arne Kildal. Boston: Gorham Press, 1910. James, Henry. Essays in London and Elsewhere. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893. Johnston, Brian. To the Third Empire: Ibsens Early Drama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. ----------. Text and Supertext in Ibsens Drama. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1989. ----------. The Ibsen Cycle. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Knight, G. Wilson. Ibsen. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962. Lebowitz, Naomi. Ibsen and the Great World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 1990. Lyons, Charles R. Henrik Ibsen: The Divided Consciousness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. ----------, ed. Critical Essays on Henrik Ibsen. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Marker, Frederick J., and Lise-Lone Marker. Ibsens Lively Art: A Performance Study of the Major Plays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. McFarlane, James. Discussions of Henrik Ibsen. Boston: Heath, 1967. ----------. Ibsen and Meaning. Norwich, U.K.: Norvik, 1989.

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----------, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen. New York: Cambridge University Press,1994. ----------, ed. Henrik Ibsen: A Critical Anthology. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1970. Meyer, Hans George. Henrik Ibsen. New York: Ungar, 1972. Meyer, Michael Leverson. Henrik Ibsen: The Making of a Dramatist. London: Hart-Davis, 1967. Moi, Toril. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Northam, John. Ibsen: A Critical Study. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Olafsson, Trausti. Ibsens Theatre of Ritualistic Visions: An Interdisciplinary Study of Ten Plays. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2008. Robinson, Michael, ed. Turning the Century: Centennial Essays on Ibsen. Norwich, U.K.: Norvik, 2006. Shafer, Yvonne. Henrik Ibsen: Life, Work, and Criticism. Fredericton, N.B., Canada: York Press, 1985. Shaw, Bernard. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. London: Scott, 1891. ----------. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces. 7 volumes. London: Bodley Head, 1970-1974. Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. Ibsen and Early Modernist Theatre. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997. Templeton, Joan. Ibsens Women. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Tennant, P. F. D. Ibsens Dramatic Technique. New York: Humanities Press, 1965. Theoharis, C. T. Ibsens Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy. New York: St. Martins Press, 1996. Thomas, David. Henrik Ibsen. New York: Grove, 1984.

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